Hi folks, It''s no secret that self-publishing a book and putting it under a creative commons license while providing an HTML version for free, and not marketing the paid version to anyone and giving 25% of your revenue to charity might not be the most profitable venture. The preceding run-on sentence tells the full story of the first year of the Ruport Book[0]. Of course, we didn''t write the Ruport Book to profit. We wanted to share with people a walk through the internals of Ruport, so that they could become valuable contributors as well as be able to do interesting things in their day to day work. We had hoped that the sales of the book would offset some of the costs of writing it, and we didn''t quite manage to do that. However, we also hoped that we could use some of the profits to pay for various resources for Ruport''s development, including various hosting fees. We did manage to do that! == So here''s the real news: After January 1st, 2009, the Ruport Book will be made completely free. You''ll be able to download the latest PDF version without paying a cent, and you''ll be able to buy a print copy from Lulu[1] at cost. In addition to that, we''re going to reformat our manuscript in AsciiDoc and put it on github, so that folks can fork the book, make changes and corrections, and send a pull request back so that we can make live changes to the book that can be pushed out to the website and to Lulu. This may take us a little while to get set up, but rest assured, it will happen. We want to thank the folks who paid money for the book. After we pay all the costs to dissolve Rinara Press, LLC, and distribute money to the folks who helped fund us as well as the Engineers Without Borders charity, we are going to donate our individual earnings to the project. We''ll have a public spending record, so folks can see where the money from the book ultimately went. For this reason, you may still wish to buy a copy of the book between now and January 1st, as you''ll be directly benefiting Ruport itself. However, if you''re new to the project and not sure you''re ready to contribute, just wait a couple weeks and you''ll get the PDF book for free. Though we would have loved to see the Ruport Book sell a ton of copies, we''re just as happy to see that the HTML version was well read, with thousands of unique visitors each month. We look forward to seeing the book grow as a community resource as we make our resources even more accessible to anyone who wishes to use them. Warm Regards, Greg & Mike, from the Ruport Book [0] http://ruportbook.com [1] http://www.lulu.com/content/1700117 -- Technical Blaag at: http://blog.majesticseacreature.com Non-tech stuff at: http://metametta.blogspot.com "Ruby Best Practices" Book now in O''Reilly Roughcuts: http://rubybestpractices.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFFw@public.gmane.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---